Halliday's "Call To Develop Work" On Lexical Representation

Fontaine (2017: 9):

The call to develop work in this area can be traced back to Halliday's 1961 paper, where he put forward the ground-breaking idea that “the ‘lexical item,’ is unrestricted grammatically; grammatical categories do not apply to it, and the abstraction of the item itself from a number of occurrences … depends on the formal, lexical relations into which it enters” (1961:277). At that time, he expected that “it should not be long before we find out much more about how language works at this level” (ibid.), since working out large scale frequencies of items in collocation would no longer be difficult. However, we have not yet seen this kind of detailed work, perhaps with the exception of Tucker (e.g. 1996).

Blogger Comments:

This is misleading, because it is untrue. To be clear, Halliday (1961) — on Scale and Category Grammar, not Systemic Functional Grammar — is not a "call to develop work" in lexical representation. Rather, its stated purpose is demonstrate how 'to bring lexis in relation to grammar', which, importantly, involves distinguishing the lexical item from the word as grammatical unit. Halliday (2002 [1961]: 59-61):

8 Lexis
8.1 This section is intended merely to bring lexis into relation with grammar, not to discuss the theory of lexis as such. As has been pointed out (above, 3.3. and 6.3), there is no one / one correspondence in exponence between the item which enters into lexical relations and any one of the grammatical units. It is for this reason that the term lexical item is used in preference to word, “word” being reserved as the name for a grammatical unit, that unit whose exponents, more than those of any other unit, are lexical items. 

Not only may the lexical item be coextensive with more than one different grammatical unit; it may not be coextensive with any grammatical unit at all, and may indeed cut right across the rank hierarchy. Moreover, since the abstraction involved is quite different, what is for lexis “the same” lexical item (that is, different occurrences of the same formal item) may be a number of different grammatical items, so it is not true that one lexical item always has the same relation to the rank hierarchy. So that, in English, (i) a lexical item may be a morpheme, word or group (at least); (ii) a lexical item may be assigned to no rank, being for example more than a word but less than a whole group, or even both more and less than a word – part of one word plus the whole of another, sometimes discontinuously; and (iii) one and the same lexical item may in different occurrences cover any range of the possibilities under (i) and (ii). 

This does not mean that lexical items cannot be identified in grammar; it means that they are not identified by rank. They are identified, as has been suggested (above, 6.3), by their being unaccounted for in systems. But it is an additional, descriptive reason (additional, that is, to the theoretical one that lexical items lend themselves to different relations of abstraction) for keeping grammar and lexis apart. When the two have been described separately, the next stage is to relate them; and it is here that the complex relation between lexical item and grammatical unit must be accounted for. This is exactly parallel to what was said above (7.1) about grammar and phonology; and, of course, it applies equally to phonology and lexis, where, after separate description, is displayed the relationship between the lexical item and the categories of phonology. 

8.2 The task of lexis can be summed up, by illustration, as that it has to account for the likelihood of wingless green insects and for the, by contrast, unlikelihood of colourless green ideas. As in grammar, we shall expect language to work by contrasting “more likely” with “less likely” rather than “possible” with “impossible”; but, as has often been pointed out, this particular type of likelihood is not accounted for by grammar, at least not by grammar of the delicacy it has yet attained. It is, however, too often assumed that what cannot be stated grammatically cannot be stated formally: that what is not grammar is semantics, and here, some would add, linguistics gives up. But the view that the only formal linguistics is grammar might be described as a colourless green idea that sleeps furiously between the sheets of linguistic theory, preventing the bed from being made. What are needed are theoretical categories for the formal description of lexis. 

It seems that two fundamental categories are needed, which we may call collocation and set. The first basic distinction between these and the categories of grammar is that in lexis there are no scales of rank and exponence. There is no hierarchy of units; therefore no rank scale. There is only one degree of abstraction – a set is a set of formal items and a collocation is a collocation of formal items; therefore no exponence scale (exponence there is, of course, but it is a simple polarity). Only the scale of delicacy remains; sets and collocations can be more and less delicate. 

There is an analogy with the categories of grammar, an analogy due to the nature of language as activity. Collocation, like structure, accounts for a syntagmatic relation; set, like class and system, for a paradigmatic one. There the resemblance ends. 

Collocation is the syntagmatic association of lexical items, quantifiable, textually, as the probability that there will occur, at n removes (a distance of n lexical items) from an item x, the items a, b, c . . . Any given item thus enters into a range of collocation, the items with which it is collocated being ranged from more to less probable; and delicacy is increased by the raising of the value of n and by the taking account of the collocation of an item not only with one other but with two, three or more other items. Items can then be grouped together by range of collocation, according to their overlap of, so to speak, collocational spread. The paradigmatic grouping which is thereby arrived at is the set. The set does not form a closed system, but is an open grouping varying in delicacy from “having some (arbitrary minimum) collocation in common” to subsets progressively differentiated as the degree of collocational likeness set as defining criterion increases. 

In lexis, as in grammar, it is essential to distinguish between formal and contextual meaning. Once the formal description has identified the categories and the items, these can and must be treated contextually. The formal item of lexis, the lexical item, is unrestricted grammatically; grammatical categories do not apply to it, and the abstraction of the item itself from a number of occurrences (including, for example, the answer to the question whether one is to recognise one lexical item or more than one) depends on the formal, lexical relations into which it enters. The nature of these relations is such that formal statements in lexis require textual studies involving large-scale frequency counts: not of course of the frequency of single items, but of items in collocation. Since these are no longer difficult to undertake, it should not be long before we find out much more about how language works at this level.